A common problem is that the startup did not anticipate their website’s popularity, they were taken completely by surprise. Their project ended in failure, when users start abandoning them due to “slowness”, “errors” etc.

It is understandable that sometimes the project might not have the resources (hardware, the developers etc) to have a perfectly scalable solution.

So the next best thing is to be prepared for the “possibly inevitable”, to be able to “fail gracefully” or “soften the impact”. Or like how Hal Helms called it, “The Pre Post-Mortem“.

Some of the biggest social websites on the internet never anticipated their growth spurt. It just sort of happened. The websites that pour in great deals of money with tight deadlines usually don’t even come close.

Scott’s response definitely hits the nail on the spot. We frequently see this scenario happening again and again where the final approval has to come from no one but the bosses.

But I also like to throw a question back by playing the devil’s advocate.

If today you are an internal project manager handling the development of a particular website, what would you do to improve the situation? what and how would your actions be to
1) convince your bosses that it’s the users that matters
2) convince your bosses that whatever their opinions may not be representative of the target users?
3) verify and convince which of your bosses opinions are ‘true’ to that of the target users and which are not? To bring it further, how would you even know if your own opinions are ‘true’?